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Thinking Beyond the Horse and Buggy

Early 20th century buggy companies competed for customers who sought luxurious and efficient horse buggies and looked for innovative ways to produce the best in the market. The invention of the car quickly put a wrench in their plans, disrupting and transforming the industry.

Software-driven vehicle transformation

Trying to exponentially transform the way you manage and interact with your vehicles by adding more mechanical gears and cool (but disjointed) gadgets to them is like trying to improve the horse-buggy by adding more horses to pull the buggy.

Instead empower components to integrate, leveraging cloud to enable quick safety decision making, a more productive ride and self-correcting predictive analysis – improving efficiency and reducing costs.

Enter Microsoft’s Connected Vehicle Solution

Digital transformation is reshaping the automotive industry by enabling autonomous driving technologies, advanced driving assistance systems and intelligent infotainment experiences.

These breakthrough technologies are providing automakers and fleet managers with new opportunities to build deeper relationships with customers, streamline their maintenance services, and open new revenue streams.

Take advantage of new opportunities and transform your business

When deciding on the first step, consider adding connectivity. Using real-time vehicle connectivity, automakers and fleet managers can enable remote interactions and use vehicle data to predict service needs, provide consumers personalized offers, and monetize new data streams, positively impacting the bottom line by:

  • Increasing vehicle and parts sales. Increase your vehicle’s desirability by enabling customers to remotely interact with their vehicle, track its location, review trip history, and receive push notifications about upcoming service, accidents, and parental controls. Improve parts and accessory sales by providing targeted offers and loyalty programs to drive higher conversion rates of offers, utilization of dealer service departments, and interactions with dealerships.
  • Proactively addressing maintenance. Lengthen the life of vehicles and increase customer satisfaction by running remote diagnostics and applying predictive analytics to vehicle data to proactively calculate vehicle service needs based on mileage, driving conditions, and location. Use these predictions to deliver personalized offers to customers and keep fleet assets running at maximum efficiency.
  • Enabling new revenue streams. Uncover new business opportunities by monetizing real-time vehicle data for third-party consumption or creating new value-add services for customers. For example, facilitate smart insurance by offering insurance companies preauthorized access to client data to enable pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-drive insurance offerings. Alternatively, deliver new in-app services such as mobile payments to ease transactions for dealer services or add-on roadside assistance services.
  • Deploying quickly. Utilizing a compliant cloud architecture, the Vehicle Management solution can be deployed quickly virtually anywhere in the world. Each deployment can be customized to your brand and localized for its market. Built on a continuously evolving platform that includes firmware over-the-air (FOTA) updates, your solution will always have the latest capabilities and security protections.

Learn more about how customers are using Microsoft Connected Vehicles Solutions, and contact me on LinkedIn to find out how we can work together to help transform your connected vehicles operations.